Review: Hamlet in Spanish, Starring Actors with Down Syndrome

Hamlet has Down Syndrome. So does the actor—or, rather, each of the actors—playing him, in Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet, the Spanish-language devised theater piece that arrives at Theatre for a New Audience after playing 51 cities worldwide since its Peruvian premiere in 2019.

This work, performed with English supertitles, documents a year-long theatrical experiment of eight actors with Down Syndrome as they collaborated with the neurotypical director Chela De Ferrari, founder of Teatro La Plaza in Lima.

Early on, Cristina León Barandiarán interviews Jaime Cruz, who says he’s speaking neither as Jaime nor Hamlet but as Jaimlet, a sort of actor-character hybrid. “Being Hamlet is as hard as being Jaime,” Cruz says. “Fools think we are fools. They think they can play us like flutes.” That’s one bracingly fresh way into the play: The misperception of Hamlet’s gullibility mirrors the condescension towards adults with Down Syndrome. “People assume we are like children who never grow up,” Cruz explains.

Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet is, in essence, a series of engagements with Shakespeare’s play, each vignette featuring the actors’ discovery of themselves, in some form, within an excerpt of the text. Throughout, both Hamlet and Ophelia are reimagined as characters with Down Syndrome, with each highlighted moment from the original play revised in that context.

In Hamlet’s first act, Polonius (Manuel García) famously rattles off a laundry list of life lessons for his daughter Ophelia (Ximena Rodríguez). Here, he begins by reminding her that she has an extra chromosome before advising her, “Your body has low muscle tone: beware of fights” and “You have difficulties to understand some things: accept the censures of others, but protect your judgment.”

Claudius’s ascension to the throne instead of Prince Hamlet here has an explicitly cruel logic behind it. Hamlet, Claudius (Octavio Bernaza) explains in an address to his subjects, doesn’t have “the necessary abilities” to rule. And when Hamlet rejects Ophelia’s love, it’s now recast in freshly harsh terms of internalized ableism that twists around the original language: “Hey, why don’t you go to a nunnery? Why wouldst thou be a breeder of retards? It were better my mother had not borne me.” Hamlet and Ophelia also share a sensual dance that pushes back against the desexualization of neurodivergent people.

These are fascinating analogues that focus more on the relationships these actors might recognize in their own lives (the over-anxious father, the disempowering uncle, the dehumanizing would-be lover) than Shakespeare’s plot itself. But since the point of each scene is that discovery of a personal resonance, all of these exchanges with Hamlet have fundamentally identical structures, disconnected from the original play’s momentum. Each response to the play restarts from square one rather than accumulating. Some of the more abstract sequences—the “testimonial exercises,” for example, through which de Ferrari interweaves Ophelia’s final monologue around the hopes and dreams of the actors—can also feel over-formalized, the devising process and its focus on producing self-contained vignettes getting in the way of the clearest, most authentic storytelling.

But Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet is most effective theatrically when it looks outward from its interplay with Hamlet’s content to focus on the actors themselves. In the most amusing sequence, Cruz FaceTimes with Ian McKellen (with old interview footage overdubbed with Spanish spoken in a crisply British accent) to ask him questions about playing Hamlet. Then Cruz watches a clip of Laurence Olivier’s “To be or not to be,” lipsynching along with the heightened delivery and mimicking the stylized gestures, before another actor (Álvaro Toledo) interrupts to demand they find their own way into performing the speech: “He has his project,” Toledo reminds the company, “and we have ours.”

The more meta it gets, the better the gentle provocation. For Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, the cast invites neurotypical audience members onstage to play trees and the moon. After one run-through, they have feedback for their guests onstage: They “should act as if they had Down Syndrome.” But “they’ll be awful at it,” Toledo says. It’s the show’s sharpest moment, subverting the audience expectation that actors with Down Syndrome doing Shakespeare must be measured against neurotypical performers. Who set that standard anyway? Tasked with acting “as if they had Down Syndrome,” neurotypical audience members suddenly aren’t the baseline for excellence but the ones who can’t possibly measure up.

Not that Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet is in the business of overtly reproaching its audience for their prejudice. There’s an ebullient warmth and welcome to the production that culminates in a curtain call featuring each performer showcasing their personality and talents (Lucas Demarchi is a fierce ribbon dancer) before inviting the audience to join in an exuberant dance party onstage. But it’s this touring cast of visitors that’s sharing the invitation. This classical theater in Brooklyn is their house now, their turf, and in the very act of claiming it as their own, they’re choosing to throw open the doors to everyone.